sg&a挑战：追求卓越，超越同行（英）

Operations PracticeThe SG&A challenge: Achieve excellence andoutperform your peers New analysis reveals how organizations can deliver sustained savings andlong-term impact. byJosh Peters,Jung Paik, andMartin RosendahlwithAbhishek Shirali As productivity growth slows,top-performing organizations are moving beyond traditionalcost-cutting measures to reach new levels of SG&A efficiency. Leading firms are redesigningoperating models and integrating AI-powered solutions to accelerate data-driven decision-making and achieve lasting efficiency. Great companies know how to do more with less. US organizations, for example, have spentdecades squeezing waste out of operating processes, delivering year-on-year labor productivityimprovements of 1 to 4 percent.1Yet most companies have conspicuously failed to achievesimilar rates of improvement elsewhere in their organizations. In 2016, our colleagues analyzedthe performance of programs targeting cost reduction in sales, general, and administrativefunctions (SG&A at 238 companies in the S&P Global 1200. They found that, between 2003and 2013, only a quarter of those initiatives achieved sustained savings over four years or more. Almost a decade after that study, the picture has changed. New analysis shows that incrementalyear-on-year improvements in SG&A productivity have slowed for most companies. It alsoreveals that a select group of companies are reducing faster and longer, and that steep andsustained reductions in SG&A costs are associated with superior shareholder returns. Over thepast decade, the highest SG&A performers have seen total shareholder returns increase at 1.7times the rate of their lower-performing peers. This article looks at the SG&A efficiency of a larger group of companies between 2013 and2024. Like the 2016 analysis, the present one defines SG&A cost ratio as an organization’sSG&A expenditure relative to its revenue.2SG&A includes a company’s spend on sales,marketing, research and development, finance, human resources, and other overhead—in otherwords, most of the costs not associated with making a product. These costs are frequentlytargeted when margins are squeezed by inflation in the cost of inputs or when technology andanalytics improve labor productivity. Achieving such cost reductions is complex, as it requirescompanies to improve efficiency while maintaining the service quality and speed required tosupport business objectives. SG&A performance is rising Our analysis identifies steady overall improvement in SG&A efficiency. The median SG&A costratio across companies improved by 0.75 percent per year between 2003 and 2013. Andbetween 2013 and 2024, the median of 882 companies in our new data set improved theirSG&A cost ratio by 0.43 percent per year (Exhibit 1). The rate of improvement is slowing downbecause companies saw lower revenue growth over this period and benefited less from SG&Aspend leverage. Also, most companies had already captured the low-hanging fruit from right-shoring, technology, and standardization during the first decade of the millennium. Exhibit1 Critically, though, the push to optimize SG&A has not stopped. Companies in every quartilecontinue to drive SG&A cost reduction over time, thanks to a new set of levers, includingartificial intelligence (AI). And the top quartile of companies over both time periods improvedroughly twice as fast as the median, underscoring the potential for even top performers tobecome more competitive through effective SG&A management. Regionally, we found only small differences between companies in Europe, North America, andAsia–Pacific. We observe greater differences between sectors, with wide ranges of SG&Aperformance in sectors with significant variation in the intensity of marketing, research, andcustomer volume (Exhibit 2). In financial services, for example, the bottom-quartile SG&A costratio of 53 percent is more than 2.5 times the top-quartile ratio of 21 percent, due to differencesin structure and spend decisions between investment and retail banks. The implication of these consistent and global SG&A performance improvements is clear: Toremain competitive, companies must continuously strive for improved SG&A efficiency, or theyrisk falling behind. And while a company’s sector influences SG&A performance, it should not—and does not—limit a company’s ambition. Exhibit2 ‘Sustained Transformers’ strive for a step change in SG&A efficiency How are companies improving the efficiency and effectiveness of SG&A activities? As with anybusiness improvement effort, organizations can attempt to change incrementally—for example,by setting gradually more demanding performance targets. Alternatively, they can strive for a step change in performance by implementing rapid and significant alterations to organizationalstructure, processes, and tools. In the case of SG&A functions, such transformation efforts mayinvolve centralizing functions, outsourcing or right-shoring key activities, redes